SEPTEMBER 17, 1993 GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE 17

ENTERTAINMENT

A culture's response to death and dying

El Velorio

Cleveland Institute of Art

by Charlton Harper

I am sitting with Pepón Osorio in the viewing room of a funeral home. There are two overstuffed comfortable couches, several caskets and body bags, and rows of chairs for mourners. The coffins are each different, a couple are extravagant and massive, one open, the others closed. The flag of Puerto Rico drapes one closed lid, while directly across sits a body bag, removed, almost clinical in its solitude. Inscriptions about death and loss and strength are painted on the walls.

The chilling setting is not dispelled by the fact that we are actually sitting inside a piece of art, Osorio's El Velorio (The Wake), an enormous installation currently on view at the Cleveland Institute of Art through October 3. It's a tribute to Latinos who have died of AIDS and a provoking commentary on community response. While Osorio has sought to communicate a particular culture's reaction to disease and death, family and love, the work's universal aptness is obvious. "I did not want to say to the world that if you have AIDS you will die, but that a lack of community and services is why help comes so late," says Osorio.

It also reverberates within a historical context. The title is taken from a painting by the 19th century Puerto Rican realist painter Francisco Oller, depicting the wake for a child who had died of cholera. The painting shows grief and sorrow, but also joy, for the death of a child meant the birth of an angel. But where is the joy in this haunting room? "I wanted to show how our community deals with death and burying a loved one. In the last century we faced cholera. Now it is AIDS at the end of this century. I don't think we have learned enough from the past. There is so much denial."

Denial goes a long way in linking El Velorio to Osorio's other mammoth installation at CIA, The Scene of the Crime (Whose Crime), a work jointly commissioned by the Institute and New York's Whitney Museum of American Art. A living room and connected dining room, in actual scale, virtually assault the viewer with their overloaded detail. In line with Osorio's current work, the rooms pulsate with the energy from hundreds of chucherias—trinkets, tchotchkes. Everywhere there is something for the eye, a bizarrely baroque working of kitsch. Photographs of people are everywhere, from dozens of lockets that decorate a wet bar, to framed photos spilling across a table top. Chairs are covered in photo-upholstery. There are enough ceramic chucherias to stock several resale shops. Religious and pop icons collide throughout; a Virgin sits atop a trickling fountain while pages from Spanish language tabloids paper the walls. Colors are almost suffocating in their intense reds and golds.

Looking closer there seems to have been a crime. Police lines prevent entrance, forcing a distance on the viewer. A sheeted body is sprawled on the floor in the midst of broken furniture and ceramic dust. Blood stains cover much of the area. Strangely, several klieg lights and video cameras guard the rooms. Has a crime occurred, or is this a

quiet moment on a movie set? Is this garish display really someone's home, or has Hollywood created more myth on a studio backlot?

"Both works are about denial," Osorio explains, shedding some light on the question. "I wanted to show how Hollywood denies the reality of Latino life, the variety of Latino life. It is happening and we are aware of it." But the denial runs both ways, from a denial that ignores the diversity of a vast community, to the lack of acceptance within a community towards issues that threaten to rip it apart. Osorio has even faced his own denial. "When I was younger I wanted to hide my mother's knickknacks. We all go through this, hiding the identity of family, of culture. We are trained to live with denial."

The sheer abundance of materials and weight of the issues raised by his work make big demands on an audience. For most people familiar with art limited to flat canvas and offering little involvement from the viewer, Osorio's work will seem shocking. "I wanted the message to be direct and confrontational," he says. "The size helps with that. I want people to stop and really look, to become a witness."

While the tendency may be to stroll past and hurriedly dismiss the work as overloaded, it may be dangerous to spend too much time cataloging the pieces at risk of losing sight of larger issues. The welcome mat that greets each visitor is a useful direc-

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tive tool: "Welcome," it reads, "only if you can understand that is has taken years of pain to gather into our homes our most valuable possessions, but the greater pain is to see how in the movies others make fun of the way we live."

Also useful in guiding a viewer to Osorio's pained center, the role the media plays in

distorting reality and shaping perception, are wall displays of video movie boxes that serve to frame the rooms. Lined on shelves like those at any local video store, each box is covered with an inscription so candid and honest that it could be an actual surveyed response. Reads one, "When I take chilmy

dren to the movies I always have to explain to them that the Latino is not really a bad person, that he was the one chosen for the role," and "Haven't you noticed that the villain is almost always Puerto Rican?"

The replication of these statements, box after box, further points to the widespread dissemination of Hollywood distortion. To see a movie in a theater provides inherent limitations on how large the audience will be; with VCRs and the public hunger for home viewing, the possibilities for unlimited, uncontrolled reception of these distortions is infinite. And it's not just a Latino problem. The great void of television syndication allows for the continued life span of outdated trash, where John Ritter will endlessly prance and lisp his way around as a gay man and Donna Reed will forever be a limited view of woman.

Throughout our talk people have wandered in and out of The Wake. Some glance and move out quickly, others stay. An older man and woman sat for a moment down front, speaking closely together, then parting for moments of absorbed silence. Pepón says that often people will gather in clusters, sitting and talking, coming together the way people do at funerals, blurring the line between life and art. "This is a place they've been before. This is a place they know." Maybe this act of confrontation is the joy, the celebration, the crisis, the extensions of family...angels are born. Sitting amidst this amplified pain and loss, I've been here before.

As we wrap up our discussion, a student wanders in, hands filled with books. "I need some place to sit and think," she pants. Pepón Osorio smiles and welcomes her. "Why not come in here? The couches are comfort-

able." The grimness is eased a bit as another link is forged.

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